‘So what happens?’ I asked. My stomach felt hollow with the familiar sensation of thrilling nausea.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What happens when you trap the birds?’
Mally looked at me for a long time, like he was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Gently, he took the raven’s skull from my hand and placed it back in the cupboard. He was standing very close to me. The shaft of light coming through the window had shifted slightly, and shone into his eyes. He didn’t blink, and his pupils were pinpricks, tiny dots against the pale brown irises.
‘The bird puts its head out to pick up the worm. What it doesn’t know is that I’ve pinned the worm to the ground. Just a little pin, right through its middle.’ The backs of his fingers brushed against the fabric of my t-shirt where it covered my stomach. I didn’t flinch.
‘Carry on.’
‘The worm wriggles. It wriggles and wriggles and wriggles but it can’t get free.’ His hand moved deftly under the hem of my t-shirt and I felt cool fingers on the skin of my belly.
‘The bird can’t help itself. It wants to eat the worm so it pulls at it, it keeps on tugging at it. Eventually the worm might break in two, or the pin might slide out, but by this time I’ve got the noose lifted up around the bird’s neck.’ His hand was moving upwards under my t-shirt, stroking my flesh.
‘And then I pull the end of the wire, slowly at first, gently, so the bird doesn’t realise what’s happening. Slowly, gently, and all the time the noose is getting tighter and tighter.’ His breath was hot on my cheek.
‘And then, very quickly, before the bird knows what’s happening, I pull the wire and it tightens around the bird’s neck and it’s trapped. Trapped in the wire. And then I pull it tighter, and more often than not, the wire will either throttle it or go straight through. Straight through the bird’s neck and cut its head off.’
He took his hand away from my stomach and stood back. My breath was quicker now and I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see. That’s when I saw the photo, peeking out from one of the magazines on the bedside table.
Only half of it was visible, and it had the same orange tinge as the other photos, the ones on the wall. But it was different, because this time it was a photo of me, taken when I’d been at the plague cross early on our second day in the village. I picked it up. In the white space at the bottom was written the date: 1 August 1976. Just the day before. In the photo, I had my back to the camera, and only part of one side of my face was visible, just my ear and the curve of my cheekbone and the end of my nose. In the background was the bottom part of the plague cross, the plinth and the steps.
Mally saw me looking, but he didn’t say anything. He took the photograph off me and placed it gently on the bedside table, next to the photo of me he’d taken that afternoon. Then he sat down on the end of the bed and picked up the guitar. Without plugging it in, he started plucking at the strings with those long, slender fingers, playing the same tinny chords over and over again. I looked over at the open cupboard, at the skulls arranged in a perfectly symmetrical display. Something fluttered in the pit of my stomach.
Lorry was spreadeagled, asleep on the patch of concrete at the front of the house when I got back. He looked small and vulnerable lying there, his arms up above his head. His clown doll was discarded at his side, so I picked it up and placed it on his chest and went straight into the kitchen. I was starving and thought I could make a sandwich for me and Lorry to share. My mother was sitting at the pine table, smoking, and she looked up when I walked in and smiled. The shadows under her eyes seemed to have lifted, and the lines on her forehead looked softer, less pronounced.
‘Hi Nif. How are you?’ It was the first time she had asked me anything in ages. I must have looked surprised, because her smile got wider and she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray.
‘Come here.’ She held her arms out to me and made a beckoning motion with her fingers. Her arms when they settled around me were hard and bony, yet surprisingly strong. She held me tightly and breathed in, her face pressed into the side of my neck. When I pulled away I saw that her eyes were wet.
‘Can you feel her, Nif?’ I felt suddenly cold. ‘Can you feel her? She’s here, isn’t she? Petra’s here. She’s come back.’ She was smiling properly now, a placid smile that covered her whole face and made her eyes shine.
It was like when we used to go to church and she would listen to the priest and his mutterings in Latin, and she would look peaceful and contented. She would step up to Father Declan to take communion and as she opened her mouth, her pink tongue ready to take the wafer, she would have such a look of pure elation on her face that I thought back then I wanted to be confirmed, to have the same experience of joyful contentment as my mother did. When she would walk back to take her place in the pew, her step would be light and she would look like she was gliding.
She had the same look on her face now, and her eyes were gleaming behind the tears.
‘Petra’s come back, and she says that she’s forgiven me.’
I sat with my dad that afternoon as he worked on my mother’s sculpture. He had angled a spotlight onto the wheel where the head sat, even though there was enough light seeping in through the coagulated moss on the corrugated plastic roof.
He’d already removed much of the clay that he’d built up. He said the heat had made it harder than usual and difficult to work with. I watched as his fingers applied the new clay. The dark orange substance built up in layers, substrates, the head starting to take on its new form. He placed strips of clay under the eye sockets, and above them, using his tools to carve them once they were in place. He used his fingers to press onto the forehead, pulling back to ease the clay flat. His thumbs worked away under the chin, pulling the substance upwards and outwards, making the neck swanlike and graceful.
It was the eyes that fascinated me the most, though, and I knew that when he had formed the brows and the cheekbones and smoothed the skin, and was satisfied that the line of the nose was perfect, he would take a metal-headed tool, a piece of thick wire shaped into a loop and secured at the rough ends to a wooden handle. Meticulously, he would insert the metal end into the eyeballs, his fingers working slowly and firmly to ease out a lump of clay. This would create both the iris and the pupil. Both would merge into an unseeing void. But this afternoon he was still not satisfied and my mother’s eyes remained intact, uncarved.
Nine.
A couple of months after Petra died, my dad decided to take me and Lorry to the park. We’d hardly left our house up until then, and I think he could tell we were both bored with playing in our bedrooms. The back garden was still out of bounds.
Small feet greeted us on the pavement outside our house. It was half-term and the street was packed with kids, their brightly coloured t-shirts a relief to my eyes after the gloom of our house. The air was full of the clatter made by roller skates and skateboards. Our neighbour, Mrs Akhar, was standing on the patch of grass outside her house—when she saw us, a flicker of a frown crossed her face and she’d looked as though she was going to say something to my dad, but then she’d turned away and busied herself with watering the lilies that grew in the little border at the front of her house. Her mangy cat was rubbing itself up against her legs and eyeing me suspiciously. We’d never had pets of our own.
All along the street, gaggles of children had gathered, and as we approached them they parted to let us through. It was as though we had some invisible force field around us that made them move aside—they all stopped talking and stared at us, and a few whispered things behind their hands. I copied my dad, who walked with his head down, not looking at anyone. Lorry skipped along in front of us, oblivious.
Leaning against one of the gateposts at the park were two girls I recognised from school. Older girls, sixth-formers. As we got nearer one of them called out, ‘Hi, Jenny,’ and the other one put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.
A week or so after the accident my dad
had said that perhaps it would be a good idea for me to go back to school. He’d thought the return to a routine would help me get back to normal and that schoolwork would take my mind off things. I’d gone along with it, but I’d only stayed a couple of days. The other kids had all suddenly wanted to be my friend.
I think, in a way, there is something attractive about death, a glamour that attaches itself to those who have experienced it and which makes it appealing to those who haven’t. Girls would come up to me in the playground and ask if I needed help with my homework. I’d be in the canteen and they’d come and sit down at my table. These were the ones who had sneered at me or bullied me, right up until the time that I became interesting because I had a dead sister.
I’d ignored the girls at the gatepost, and my dad, Lorry and I had walked along the wide tarmacked path that ran around the lake. There were sprinklers going in the flower beds, and as we walked the fine haze of cold water landed on my face like mist from the sea. I stopped and turned my face to the sprinkler, which had already moved away on its back-and-forth trajectory. My dad said something about how the park authorities were probably getting the most out of their sprinklers before the hosepipe ban kicked in, how our area was one of the last to introduce the ban which already covered most of the South East. He was saying anything to break the silence that hung between us.
The ice-cream van was in its usual place and there was a line of kids snaking back from it. Without us even asking my dad had gone to stand at the back of the queue. From where we stood, I could see the jetty from where rowing boats were launched into the lake. The open space around it was always crowded with birds: ducks and geese and even swans sometimes. They congregated there as people came with their bags of bread, and the birds would flap and squawk and occasionally peck each other in their enthusiasm to get to the food.
We’d got our ice-creams and had walked in silence to the jetty. There must have been about a dozen people there that day with their bags of bread and the birds had gathered in a mad frenzy of feathers and quacking. Some of the ducks were followed around by broods of ducklings, little brown balls of fluff, the yellow stripes on their wings miniature lightning bolts. We’d stood in the middle of the hubbub and Lorry had started chasing geese, his ice-cream held in one hand, the other flailing wildly in front of him. For the first time since the accident my dad was smiling, but his eyes were wet as well.
It wasn’t long before Lorry tripped over and his ice-cream went head-down onto the tarmac. He’d tried to pick it up, but my dad ran over and grabbed it, said it was dirty and put it in the bin. Lorry had started wailing—people looked at him and smiled and frowned, and my dad had to go down on his haunches and tell him he’d buy him another one.
It was the sound from behind me, a great whooshing noise, that made me turn around. A swan was flapping wildly a few feet from me, its wings sending ripples through the air as it tried to slow down for landing. It came down heavily, its enormous orange feet thumping onto the ground, the momentum from its own massive weight carrying it forward into the flock. One of its wings sat lower than the other, and trailed along the ground at an awkward angle. It was injured. It staggered onwards, and where its giant feet had hit the ground there lay the broken body of one of the ducklings, crushed into a brown and yellow smear on the tarmac.
Its mother was oblivious, and had wandered off, her depleted brood trailing after her. My dad was still fussing over Lorry and I scooped up the duckling in my hand. The tiny bill was still warm when I stroked it, but the head was set at an impossible angle to the body, and the soft down was flattened and congealed.
It wasn’t easy getting the duckling back to our house. I had to hold it loosely in one hand, trying not to crush it, but at the same time needing to keep it hidden. Luckily, Lorry had grazed his knee when he’d tripped over, so we didn’t stay any longer at the park. When we got back home and my dad was dealing with my brother, I went straight out to the back garden and dug a hole with a trowel. I dug it under the bush where I’d found the magpie’s nest a few weeks before: it seemed appropriate somehow. I even made a little cross out of two twigs tied together with dry grass, and put that on the top.
When I went back three weeks later and dug it up, the duckling was nothing more than a collection of tiny fragile bones, connected by a thin covering of sodden down. The beak came away in my hand when I picked up the tiny corpse. It was shrivelled and grey. The feet were curled in on themselves, the tiny webs now absent, but the miniature claws were still in place. I reburied most of the body, a pathetic clump of bones and down, but I kept the beak and one of the feet and put them in the shoe box under my bed.
That was the night I cut off my hair.
Ten.
Tuesday 3rd August 1976
We’d driven past the pub on our way into the village, but I hadn’t noticed it then. Although it had only been a few days, it seemed like forever since we’d left our cosy terrace in the suburbs and come to Wales. Now I could hardly remember what my bedroom looked like, or the skinny strip of garden that ran away from the back of our house, or the orange glow of street lights that stopped the darkness penetrating every corner.
We’d eaten our dinner and piled the dishes in the sink. That evening we’d feasted on the spoils of my parents’ shopping trip: beef stew heated up on the camping stove, with tinned peas and Smash and hunks of soft bread. There was chocolate mousse in pots and cream from a can and there was ice cream that my dad had bought as a treat but which had melted in the broken freezer compartment, so we drank it straight from the tub. My mother came out of her room, and we all sat together at the pine table. My dad drank wine and told a joke about a parrot and my mother smiled. She hadn’t mentioned Petra again.
I think that’s what made my dad suggest that we should all go to the pub. At first my mother wasn’t convinced, said she was tired and wanted to go to bed, but my dad persisted and finally she went upstairs to get herself ready. It was still light outside, and the heat was dirty and still, and the smell coming off me had got thick and stale. I changed my t-shirt and then, on a whim, put on a skirt I hadn’t worn in months, that my dad must have packed for me. He raised his eyebrows when he saw me, but he didn’t say anything. When my mother came downstairs she’d brushed her hair, and I thought there was a trace of lipstick on her mouth, as though she’d put it on and then thought better of it and wiped it off again.
The pub wasn’t far from our house, only a couple of hundred yards back along the lane, and as we walked I noticed again how it got dark earlier in the village than it did at home. At first it bothered me, as if this little corner of the world was different somehow, unworldly and set apart. Then I thought that it was because of the deep sides of the valley that surrounded it and rose up around us, meaning the sun dipped below the horizon earlier. When we left the cottage, the sun was inching down towards the top of the hill, watching us as we walked along the lane and starting to infuse the sky around it with a pearlescent rosy glow.
When we got to the pub it was easy to see how I’d missed it. It looked like an ordinary house from the outside. It was set back slightly from the road and made of the same stone as all the other houses in the village. There was a painted wooden board over the front door with an amateur, childish painting of what might have been a dragon.
A gang of teenaged boys had congregated outside the pub. Five or six of them, they were spotty and pallid and all had long, greasy hair. They lounged against the wall and as we walked towards the door their eyes roved up and down, assessing and appraising, first me and then my mother. My dad made eye contact with the tallest one, the one nearest the door, and held it as he pushed the heavy wooden door open with his shoulder.
At first I thought we’d walked into someone’s front room. There was a massive stone fireplace, an inglenook, with a huge empty grate. Upturned horseshoes were nailed into the enormous wooden beam that ran across the top of it, and the middle of the beam looked scorched, as though an ancient fire had once
taken hold there. There were circles scratched into it, large ones and small ones overlapping each other, identical to the ones I’d seen scratched onto the gatepost outside Mally’s house.
The long wooden table in front of the fireplace was flanked by two benches, each of which was occupied by two men, who turned as we came in. Their faces weren’t hostile, merely blank, as they looked us over and turned away again. They could have been any of the men I’d seen since we’d been in the village: small, dark and compact, dressed in dirty tweed jackets and flat caps. Each man held the butt of a cigarette pinched between the finger and thumb of one hand. In their other hands, they held a splayed collection of playing cards. No-one spoke.
The room was lit by two strip lights, like the ones in the kitchen of the cottage, and it was too bright to be cosy. There was a dartboard on the wall to our left, and a door past it with a sign for the gents. An empty wooden settle spanned the wall at the back, and on our right, on the far side of the fireplace, stood a doorway. There was no bar. The walls were empty, unadorned except for grubby marks that ran around the room at waist height. The floor was of massive grey flagstones, chipped and stained, the grooves between them holding who knew how many centuries’ worth of dirt.
I think if my dad had been sober we might have turned around and left then, but the wine he’d drunk with dinner had made him bold. Still carrying Lorry, he headed for the doorway in the corner. We followed.
The room we walked into was darker than the first, and if anything stuffier and even warmer. There was another empty fireplace to our right, backing onto the one in the other room, and arranged around it was a motley collection of armchairs and small sofas, ancient and slumped, covered in discoloured velour and Draylon. The occupants of these chairs, half a dozen men in dark suits clutching black-covered books, looked startled to see us, as if we should have somehow had our presence announced. These ones looked like the men I’d seen outside the chapel: hunched and sombre. I thought they must have been reading when we walked in, but now they shut their books and put them away, sliding them into the crevices left by the cushions on the armchairs, or slipping them into jacket pockets. There were no drinks on the small table in front of them.
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